Category Archives: city

bikes, city, GPS, MTB, roadtrip, travel, USA

Boise

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All yesterday’s activity induced a fantastic night’s sleep for me & it was late in the morning before we got downtown on another clear, sunny day. Set in a beautiful park, we were happy to spend a couple of hours at the Idaho State Museum to see if we couldn’t discover a bit more about this state that we hadn’t really intended to visit (I think we are both really glad that a ride, of all things – imagine that, induced us to duck east from the Pacific states). I won’t bore you with the history of a state that most of you won’t visit – but nonetheless I found it interesting. We got another good dose of Lewis & Clark history – which we got a lot of at the start of the trip.

After lunching in a nice big leafy park & wandering through a decent rose garden we headed to the historic area of downtown. We didn’t find many old buildings, but did manage to find the Basque Center. Apparently, Boise has the second largest Basque population in the States – after Bakersfield, CA, of all places. Eventually we made it to the Capitol building. Not overawing from the outside (I think the dome looks too skinny), the interior is fantastic.

It’s been recently restored & all the (Alaskan) marble inside it just great. Unlike other Capitols we’ve been in, the walls are remarkably free of portraits & other such things – this suited the place very well. Looking up, I really wanted to be going up the little spiral staircase to the top of the dome. But that wasn’t open to the public of course. With the best display about the state we’ve seen in a Capitol & not many people around, it was a great visit.

Always keen to get another ride in, there was only time & energy for a short one close to town. Miles had told me of one starting on the road to Bogus Basin (what a great name for a ski-area) just out of the suburbs. Corral Trail started with more climbing than I was expecting, but it was mostly doubletrack & not too bad. A local guy snuck up behind me, told me I was riding well & then proceeded to beat the pants off me the rest of the way up. But Bernie was great, he changed his ride to make sure I got the bonus mile on the end of Bob’s Trail that is not so easy to find. The first half or so of the downhill was on Corral & it was fast & flowy. There were plenty of little jumps – these irritated me for a while as they weren’t quite right for the speed I was going, I kept touching the front wheel down first (just). I finally figured out that loading up the front fork just on approach made life much better, I was pretty happy from then on.

Bob’s Trail started out much the same as it followed a gulch all the way down to suburbia. But one had to be careful around blind corners, as pesky rocks would suddenly jump out & plant themselves in the side of the trail. More technical, this trail was most enjoyable – even if I had to walk down a few metres (still have that fear of ending the riding component of this trip early doing something stupid). Skirting around between a golf course & some really nice houses we were all done an hour after I set off. What a great ride for only an hour’s worth of effort & so close to the city too (the trail map & markings were great – there looks like there’s quite a network of trails to be explored up there).

Driving back to the hotel through central Boise, I though I recognised a bike on top of a Cayenne at the lights. Sure enough, we’d caught up to Miles – strange parallels with our first random meeting in Fruita. We had a quick chat at the hotel before he headed to Oregon. Any energy I burnt on the ride was soon regained – we went to a nice Basque restaurant for dinner. How are they not all fat? I was more full from that meal than I have been for ages – & that’s considering all those large portions we’ve been served.

city, roadtrip, travel, USA, vehicles

A Tale of Small “Cities”

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I woke too tired & sore to be bothered getting in a quick shuttle run up to Armstrong Connector, Sidewinder & Corral before leaving Tahoe.  Pleased to be leaving all the traffic behind, it did feel like I was leaving with unfinished business.  Maybe if I ever return the higher long trails will be clear to ride.  On the other hand, maybe it’ll be the middle of winter & I’ll be skiing.  Pipe-dreams.

We hit only the second state capital of the entire trip (the first being Helena, Montana, right at the start) in Carson City, Nevada.  We didn’t bother stopping on our way to the trio of old mining towns – Silver City, Gold Hill & Virginia City.  It’s always a little incredible how quickly dropping elevation changes you from the alpine of the Sierras to the Nevada desert landscape.  There wasn’t reason to stop in Silver City, but I did spy an old steam locomotive sitting on a siding near the top of Gold Hill.

As I was poking around looking at it (it was in pretty good condition) some guy appeared from I’m not sure where – probably checking I wasn’t trying to put it in my back pocket.  He was part of the historical society that has been restoring the loco & old freight depot adjacent to it.  He was only too happy to talk about the projects & the mining history & answer my questions – which was great.

Virginia City was only a mile up the road – Valerie came here on Saturday while I was playing in the snow & didn’t realize Gold Hill was so close.  The main street of Virginia City stretches & stretches and is most definitely the best preserved western-style street we’ve seen so far on our travels.  There were plenty of saloons, museums & of course, being Nevada, places to see your money disappear in to machines with flashing lights & irritating tunes.  The site of the Comstock Lode in the nineteenth century, this place was booming on the back of all the silver & gold being pulled out of the hills.  A couple of interesting snippets – the name Mark Twain was first used from here, as Samuel Clemens wrote for the local newspaper & George Hearst (of the Hearst Castle, which we visited almost two weeks ago, family) made one of his fortunes here.

We drove “all the way to Reno”, not much to see there – it’s like a little, tame version of Vegas in parts.   Rancho San Rafael on the northwest of town was a very pleasant spot for lunch; interestingly I could have kissed a Blarney stone.  Reminding me of “how would you like to play a central park in Newark?” (Flight of the Conchords, before you ask, Mum), for some reason there was a stone from Blarney Castle in the garden.  Continuing north we were soon going through the Californian border check as we then headed up & west into the Sierra Valley.  I was surprised that it was so wide & flat.  They obviously have plenty of water as the cropping & livestock herds gave evidence of.  Climbing out of the valley, as we pressed on east, was once again stunning, very beautiful forest as we reached Sierra City (another large village with “City” tacked on the end of its name).  Eventually we found a couple of beds at Kokanee Kabins.  Nestled in the woods, it’s great to have the birds chirping away over the steady stream of all that snowmelt running down the river.

city, friends, history, roadtrip, travel, USA, vehicles

Alcatraz

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Tuesday was another day on the waterfront in San Francisco. After a completely avoidable & regrettable communication breakdown, we met Kristy & Joel just in time to get on our booked 9.30 ferry to the Rock. Strangely, the Bay area had served up a consecutive fantastic day & it was a most pleasant short ferry ride out to Alcatraz. A very popular place to visit, I didn’t find it too crowded to get a good look around. It’s an odd island – such a beautiful setting in the gateway to the San Francisco bay with great views all around on such a day, plenty of flowers that you wouldn’t expect & a lot of birdlife (no predators). All this is contrasted markedly with it really just being a big, mostly desolate, rock with a huge old crumbling relic of a prison sitting on top.

With its history of being an army fort guarding the bay, then an army prison, then a federal penitentiary before the site of an Indian occupation & finally becoming part of the National Park system, I was fascinated. Of course, the biggest focus of the island today is the former maximum security cell block – the audio tour (the first I’ve done this trip) voiced by former guards & inmates is really well done. The cells, except solitary confinement for some reason, were smaller than I expected. It seemed as though life there was for the most part rather routine & quiet, with good meals & hot showers (so prisoners wouldn’t get acclimatized to cold water & think a swim across the bay was a good idea). Still, with the city tantalizingly close it must have been torture. The 1946 riot & various escape attempts were well detailed, as was life on the island for the children of the wardens.

Back on the mainland, we enjoyed a nice long lunch of clam chowder in sourdough bread bowls on Fisherman’s Wharf catching up about roadtrips & life in Canmore. Leaving Joel & Kristy to explore Pier 39 we headed back to the historic ships that we didn’t get the chance to wander around on Saturday. The Eureka was a big old wooden-hulled (one of the largest left) ferry from the days before the big bridges around the Bay Area. It reminded me a lot of one I went on in San Diego two years ago – there was nice little collection of old vehicles on it too. I found the most interesting to be the Balclutha – a big old three-masted sailing ship that plied quite a few different routes over its long life – curiously it used to take a lot of Californian Douglis fir to Australia for the construction of the Broken Hill mines (there’s a tenuous link to my old job at Bluescope Steel there somewhere). There was a neat little old red tug tied up – reminded me of Little Golden Books for some reason. Leaving Joel & Kristy to explore the city a little more, we returned to the hotel to do a few errands before we met for dinner.

bikes, city, GPS, MTB, roadtrip, travel, USA, vehicles

Soquel Demo & San Fran

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Quite a few people (real & internet) had been raving about the riding just north of Santa Cruz – so I decided to check out the Soquel Demonstration Forest on our way north to San Francisco yesterday. Ducking off the highway onto Summit Rd, it was a long winding drive through some quite dense forest to the trailhead. I was fortunate to have Valerie drop me at the start of the fireroad (generally, you park at the bottom & ride up the road & then a fireroad until you get to the top of the ridge – then taking one of a number of singletracks back down to more fireroad to get back up to the parking lot).

The forest was beautiful – I haven’t seen such big (girth) trees for many, many months. There were quite a few redwoods around. It was a long monotonous ride up & a very fast looking local pointed me in the direction of the singletrack down. He told me that the famous Tractor trail would be logged (& therefore closed) on Monday & recommended I did it. It was a while along the Ridge trail before hitting Tractor. It was great fun down, with some quite fast bits & some nice banked corners. I remembered having a big smile on my face for that part. Then I hit the fireroad back up to the parking lot. Maybe I’ve been spoilt with all the riding (hope I’m not becoming a singletrack snob), maybe I’m a little worn out or maybe the lack of a big American sized meal the night before did it – but this part was exceedingly boring & long. In the end, I didn’t think all the boring fireroad climbing (over 800m in just over ninety minutes) was worth it for such descents. I had planned to go around the loop twice more, but just couldn’t face it. Can you believe my apathy was so great, I didn’t even bother to take a single photo all day?!

As Valerie hadn’t been to San Fran before, we pretty much spent the day wandering around the waterfront (Ferry Building, Pier 39, Fisherman’s Wharf, Maritime National Historic Area) & then up in to the suburbs a bit. It was much as I remember it – beautiful, touristy, busy (great markets around), sunny, foggy, windy, cold. We walked up a few steep hills & managed to walk down the Crookedest Street in the World part of Lombard St & marvel at the chaos as so many tourists drove down. We stumbled across the vibrant North Beach Fair (one of the city’s largest, apparently) on our way to the very large Chinatown. One of the highlights of me just strolling around letting Valerie explore was the many vintage streetcars that are still rolling around the city streets – they are great looking machines.